Face paints update?

I'll say out of the gate that I'm glad that with an introduction of 7.3, Viera and Horthgars are now finally able to wear a sizeable portion of headgear (or at least I was lucky with encountering upgraded hats while I was checking what I have stashed in my retainers).

There is, however, a little elephant in the room (which concerns everyone, not just Viera and Hrothgars), and I wonder if developers just forgot about it. We seem to get some graphic update that results in a free fantasia every patch, but face paints are still their old pixelated horror they have always been.

I like the way my character looks otherwise (other than the non-existent bunny-tip on his nose, but I give up on that at this point), face paint right now really is the only major thing that drags it down a bit. Any chance that they will be upgraded at all? Surely they shouldn't take that much work to update? :(

https://i.ibb.co/HLKPNxh6/2025-03-26...-Cyanstyle.png

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Originally Posted by vincexorcized

Looks absolutely fine to me.

You should maybe tune down the contrast between your character skin color and paint. It’s way too white for such dark skin. It might sound dumb but pretty sure if you go with something “less” white, it would look better and more “natural”.

This is also way too much of a small detail that I’m not sure dev will one day spend resources on “fixing” face paint, but idk future so..

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It looks okay-ish on a sized-down preview, but if you open the picture in a new tab with 100% scale, it's noticeable that it's pretty blurry and messy at the edges.
Bringing it down a couple of tones down doesn't help all that much. Here is the light grey color:

https://i.ibb.co/G4jTnnBX/image.png

It's not horrible, but compared to the rest of the face looks a bit weird imo, and stands out a lot during cutscenes where WoL is shown close up. I feel like they could do relatively simple update by increasing the texture's resolution and doing some basic cleanup, similar to how they updated eyes and hair. Having done such upscales myself in the past, they usually don't take that much time, should be possible to add it into backlog and update at some point. FF14 doesn't have the most complex face paints, even this one is relatively simple.

Plus, Viera's racial tattoos look fine even in bright white, so it's really not a contrast issue. Examples:

https://i.ibb.co/N2WRmNv0/image.png

https://i.ibb.co/XkKfTMpy/image.png

https://i.ibb.co/v4ZGc8rY/image.png

I would've used last one, but it's locked behind 4th face and I don't like that face, so...

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Originally Posted by vincexorcized

That’s fair.

Maybe Viera unique paintings look good because, that’s only for their skull? Compared to other universal ones, which would probably be tons of work to invest so it fits every races? I’m not sure at all I’m only supposing here.

Either way, they always try to listen to feedbacks like they did before and try to fix what needs to be fixed in terms of graphics. So hopefully for you they would work on it in some near future if that’s a noisy complaint from the community.

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From what I know, face-paints in FF14 work like an overlay that gets adjusted to face size, and gets just slightly distorted depending on face options similar to how any tattoo irl would "move" on the skin (in my facepaint, for example, the dots above the brow will move a little depending on which eyebrow option I will choose).

Texture being of a sufficient resolution and being clean at the edges should pretty much solve the issue entirely without a need for additional work, if my understanding on how the paint functions is correct. The primary reason Viera unique ones look good is because they were released in Shadowbringers and Endwalker, and have better quality right away (iirc Yoshida even mentioned that during one of the fanfests).

Hopefully they can do that at some point, yep. My assumption is that they just forgot tbh, with how many other graphical things they're adjusting from patch to patch. That, or it's sitting on a backlog shelf for later date as a feature that isn't critical.

Agreed that face paints need to get touch ups and a lot more variety. This would best be done in conjunction with the long-requested tieing hairstyles (and it's colours) to gearsets, thereby to also tie a facepaint and it's colour to a gearset or job/stone also in the same update. I know people have suggested making them part of a glamour plate, but that would now be an outdated change by the time it comes, and people would then ask it be bound to gearset or job/stone anyway, so lets skip adding them to plates.

Among the new face paints, personally I would to see another version of the facepaint where it's a thick line across the eyes- just have this 2nd version continue all the way up the face/forehead.

The fact we only have three face paint unlocks is also wild. All three are from old All Saints Wake events, too, so, extremely few players use them, and even then, only seasonally. And I think on a few have been added since launch for everyone.

Very few players use the funky graphic sticker ones, so I wonder if the devs were summarily discouraged from expanding on it like we see with hair

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Originally Posted by RedLolly

The fact we only have three face paint unlocks is also wild. All three are from old All Saints Wake events, too, so, extremely few players use them, and even then, only seasonally. And I think on a few have been added since launch for everyone.

Very few players use the funky graphic sticker ones, so I wonder if the devs were summarily discouraged from expanding on it like we see with hair

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They said in the past that there's some strict memory limitation with the character creator, so they might have looked at the least popular category and decided to largely abandon it in favor of things like more hairstyles.

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Originally Posted by Zofian

Agreed that face paints need to get touch ups and a lot more variety. This would best be done in conjunction with the long-requested tieing hairstyles (and it's colours) to gearsets, thereby to also tie a facepaint and it's colour to a gearset or job/stone also in the same update. I know people have suggested making them part of a glamour plate, but that would now be an outdated change by the time it comes, and people would then ask it be bound to gearset or job/stone anyway, so lets skip adding them to plates.

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Tying color to gearset sounds like a potential hassle to make since the process of changing color is tied to going into character creator and that sounds like a relatively big structural change because of that, but honestly would've been dope if it's possible.

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Originally Posted by Daralii

They said in the past that there's some strict memory limitation with the character creator, so they might have looked at the least popular category and decided to largely abandon it in favor of things like more hairstyles.

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Iirc what they said is that there's essentially a limit on the amount of "slots" in character creator, which is why we don't really get new face models, and also why, for example, Au Ra have their horns tied to face (because there was a limit on an amount of categories within the character creator, too).

I think they mentioned that the limit was greatly increased with updates made in Heavensward and Dawntrail, but it's probably still a thing of concern, so while I'd have loved to see more face paints being added, we probably won't see many of them, if any. Quality improvement should be possible, though.

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Originally Posted by Halivel

I'll say out of the gate that I'm glad that with an introduction of 7.3, Viera and Horthgars are now finally able to wear a sizeable portion of headgear (or at least I was lucky with encountering upgraded hats while I was checking what I have stashed in my retainers).

There is, however, a little elephant in the room (which concerns everyone, not just Viera and Hrothgars), and I wonder if developers just forgot about it. We seem to get some graphic update that results in a free fantasia every patch, but face paints are still their old pixelated horror they have always been.

I like the way my character looks otherwise (other than the non-existent bunny-tip on his nose, but I give up on that at this point), face paint right now really is the only major thing that drags it down a bit. Any chance that they will be upgraded at all? Surely they shouldn't take that much work to update? :(

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Yes, it's low resolution and should be improved. The same happens to male miqo'te eye markings.

I'm kind of surprised that we don't get new Face Paints more often.

They are simpler to make than hair (just textures), and like them, it seems to be the only customization option they made with expanding in mind.

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Originally Posted by Halivel

Iirc what they said is that there's essentially a limit on the amount of "slots" in character creator, which is why we don't really get new face models, and also why, for example, Au Ra have their horns tied to face (because there was a limit on an amount of categories within the character creator, too).

I think they mentioned that the limit was greatly increased with updates made in Heavensward and Dawntrail, but it's probably still a thing of concern, so while I'd have loved to see more face paints being added, we probably won't see many of them, if any. Quality improvement should be possible, though.

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Adding new face paint options wouldn't overload the amount of "slots" each character uses, so I can only assume they just see us using the same 8 options of the like, 30, they made and just focus on hair or the new races instead.

That said, if DT's gotten an upgrade towards that, maybe we'll actually get more options, afterall.